put a fork in me

...'cause I'm done.

First, a roundup of the Year of the Sock, officially "done" except for the uber-socks, which are little more than a half-centimetre, but they'll keep.

Total Socks - 8 pairs. The first, and monumental, were for me, because that's what you do with your trial stuff on which you make all the mistakes. The second, with the weird and pointy toe (okay, so not all the mistakes were just on the first pair), currently residing on the feet of my dad in England. Third made their way to Deep River, Ontario, to their new owner Rach. Fourth, uh...a yarn I didn't like in the ball but knitted up cute, winged their way to Angela's chilly Minnesota toes. The fifth, all in blue, are now in China with school principal Georgina, who doesn't have central heating. Number Six went to Andrew, who can totally pull off the bizarre and ugly colour scheme and who is so far into the cool stratosphere that being linked to from somewhere so mundane as this will damage his rep, well, irreparably. And seven and eight, the cably goodness of the possum/merino toasties, a sort of bridge between socks and slippers, back to England on the parental tootsies.

Total slippers: 9, I'm pretty sure. Most made from the super-bargain yarn I dyed with food colouring. Serena, in New York, received the first pair, followed by a huge green pair for Chris, the best things about which were that they were totally free (from donated yarn) and felted beeyoutifully. Unbelievably, May saw the first pair of the five family Christmas slippers, again for Rach in snowy Ontario. Four more for her family - the too-big kids' ones "rectified" with elastic round the ankles in the end. I used the rest of the green yarn, plus some other motley bits, to make my emergency slippers when we arrived in this land of cold, damp and no heating. The matching his-n-hers greenies prompted the coinage of a new term, "yurty", courtesy of Frances and Andrew. "Yurty" indicating the sort of low-tech, bicycling, Birkenstock-wearing, vegetable-eating, lefty, recycling, pinko, Utne-reading lifestyle that they perceive us to have. Well, all right, that we do have. Jury's out on whether or not this is pejorative. And finally an ultra un-yurty pair, stripy in food-colouring-turquoise and that neon pink acrylic, brought back the 80s and went off to China again.

Also sneaking into the YOTF were the handwarmers, which Frances (of the yurty judgment) has named "warming-over-a-flaming-bin-chic". Then there was the sweater, modelled here by ma belle mere - not me, although we're practically identical and from a not very great distance, this might as well be me.

And there's one Christmas present left - knitting tradition dictates not finishing one present - which again is the bridge to what looks like it's becoming the Year of the Hand. And below, the fiddly thumbs and fingers become...

(unfinished state of course; they don't come with the needle still stuck in the wrist).

I'm also "done" in the sense of "pooped". December has been a lot of extra days at work and extra hours in the extra days. In the bit between Christmas and New Year, "The Staff" get their time off. In the bit after New Year, commonly known as "January", "The Owners" take their time off. "The Manager", pale and mystical guardian of the portals of literature, just keeps on goin'. She's the Energizer bunny of pale and mystical portal-guardians.

And here's 1st January 2008, another portal. Hope unusual and happy adventures await you on the other side.

a mes cotes le deluge...

Non stop downpour all last night. This morning, the neighbourhood scraggy-looking beaten-up cat who likes to sleep in our driveway can be found on the deck: to the left, le deluge; to the right, the ten inches of dry created by the overhang of our roof.

And one irritated cat. You see he's got one eye closed? Actually he's only got one eye. That's how beaten-up he is.

Look! Thumbs. The Year of the Hand has come early.

You knit these gloves fingers-down. So you make all the fingers separately and then put them together and carry on into the hands. It's massively fiddly but I guess it means you get the fiddly bit done first.

Eight more fiddly bits to go.

once more with passion

I know I said I don't much go to Starbucks. But let's just say today I did. We kept the bookstore open late, and the local cafe people round the corner close at five, so the green medusa-lady beckoned me. That makes twice this year.

I eschewed this time the monster fluffity tea-a-cino, instead opting for a sensible small "Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade" (god forbid they should just call it "iced tea"). Anyway, thinking I had got away with it, I was then faced with having to answer "Do you want Passion or Zen?" It was with some trepidation that I had to ask what was the difference between them. But the absolutely straight-faced, quite serious answer made my whole day; maybe my whole week:

"One comes with passion. And the other comes with zen."

I went for passion.

It was pink. Which is exactly what colour you expect from ICED TEA.

If I ever consider going there again, please will someone shake some sense into me?

meanwhile back at the yarn

There has been knitting going on, amongst all this reading and parading up and down mountains. Much of it has been secret knitting, of which I can't put up pictures. However I did knock out a couple of pairs of these handwarmers, which are a cross between making-it-up and an actual pattern. This is a truly international pair, being made from some of the NZ possum yarn (shh) and from alpaca that mum bought me in Chile.

The final pair of socks for 2007 has also been cast on.

Its a good thing I have the calm of knitting, as I have been driven to the edge lately by flies. I have always been quite live-and-let-live about flies, wafting them away and covering food but otherwise not being too bothered by their existence. Not here. New Zealand flies are stubborn, lazy, and everywhere. A gentle waft means nothing to them; they just stay put and rub their little legs together. There are so many of them, and they're on stuff: the countertop, the floor, the rug, me. When I was bemoaning being able to see my breath in the cold of the house in winter, I failed to realise it was that cold that kept these babies from hatching. Our recent warm spell started up the ticking time bombs, and I've finally snapped and become one of those people who chases around with a magazine whapping frantically at the air.

My sort-of-brother-in-law-in-law is a biologist and a bug guy. His daughters are cool as cucumbers when it comes to bugs; they are unfazed by household spiders and can tell their tussock moths from their, er, non-tussock ones. (I suspect they don't call them "bugs", either). His calm and fascinated approach has brought up no Miss Muffets, but warrior princesses who accept the wonders of nature in all her forms. It's a skill that I aspire to in my future parenting - if only so that my kids can calmly get the glass and the postcard instead of running outside, bolting the door and immediately putting the house on the market when incey wincey spider makes an appearance. So you can imagine how I put this into practice when I spotted out of the corner of my eye, a tropical-sized cockroach wending its way across my floor this morning.

I absolutely. Wigged. Out. I said such words, at such volume, that my sister - who was on the other end of my phone conversation at the time - thought that at the very least the house had been napalmed by axe-wielding maniacs. I think it was the lead-up with all the flies, culminating in this character, who got a cold tea shower as I upturned my mug over its head to imprison it while I calmed down, that led to the final breakdown.

I recently read an article about scientists creating a computer cockroach to change the behaviour patterns of real cockroaches, who are apparently highly impressionable and susceptible to peer pressure. After this episode, all I can think now is - where are the peers, and when are they arriving?

in which four friends take a Very Long Walk

One morning, four friends set off on a Very Long Walk.

They walked up rocks.

They walked in the clouds.

They walked across a crater.

They walked up a mountain.

They stood at the top.

They looked at the view.

They slid down the mountain.

They walked across snow.

They walked downhill. They walked through the grass.

They walked through a forest.

They stopped walking.

Seven-and-a-half hours. One thousand eight hundred metres up, and then down. Seventeen kilometres end to end.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Tongariro Crossing. Check.